Four years’ ago, the Olympic Games came to Global Cement’s home town of London. The event generated much excitement and a sense of pride in the city, even before the Games had started. At the time I was lucky enough to be living just yards from the route of the cycling road races - could Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish really be cycling on the same road that I commuted up every morning? Yes they could!

Written by Robert McCaffrey, Editorial Director, Global Cement Magazine

12 September 2016

I originally trained as a geologist, and gained a PhD in mineralogy and geochemistry (studying lignites in Northern Ireland) a long time ago. It’s been useful in many ways, not least to give me some insight into the relative magnitudes of things, be they time scales (3.8 billion years since life first evolved), physical scales (the difference between a microgram and a milligram) or the severity of earthquakes. The Richter Scale1 of earthquake intensity is logarithmic, meaning that for each increase in scale of one, the shaking, in short, will be ten times bigger. A Richter scale nine earthquake is 100 times ‘bigger’ than a Richter scale seven earthquake (which is already considered a major earthquake).

Written by Robert McCaffrey Editorial Director, Global Cement Magazine

28 June 2016

Friends in cement, the UK has decided to leave the EU. We at Global Cement were ‘Remainers,’ hoping for future reform of the EU. A slim majority of the British people saw it the other way and decided that there was no hope of reform, and that they did not want further integration. Jean Claude Juncker (president of the European Commission) himself had said in the week before the referendum that there was no possibility of further reform, no possibility of further renegotiation of the UK’s relationship with the EU. Perhaps his comments clinched the final result in the referendum. With 33 million votes cast, 17,410,742 (51.9%) were for an EU exit, while 16,141,241 (48.1%) were for remaining. Only 634,750 people would have had to have changed their minds for the result to be a tie.

Written by Robert McCaffrey, Editorial Director, Global Cement Magazine

07 June 2016

A book by David Charter, titled ‘Europe: In or Out?1 and subtitled ‘Everything you need to know,’ is sometimes infuriatingly impartial and even-handed. After reading the book, you will either have had your mind changed from one side to the other, will be even more convinced of your previously-held beliefs, or you will continue to be as resolutely undecided as you were before. Let me précis the book’s contents for you.

Written by Robert McCaffrey, Editorial Director, Global Cement Magazine

10 May 2016

The Hippie Movement was an informal counter-cultural collection of ideas that gained currency in the 1960s in the US, but which had largely been overtaken by other cultural movements by the 1980s, leaving only isolated adherents clinging to their out-dated ways, with believers increasingly looking like unwashed madmen from the last century.1 Right?